12 June 2026

Have Time Tracking Prices Gone Through the Roof?

We went poking around the Wayback Machine recently and noticed some things about competitor pricing that seemed… interesting. We can't substantiate any of it with hard facts — archived pricing pages are snapshots, not ledgers, and our memories are hardly court-admissible. So take this for what it is: an observation. A gut check. A "hey, does this ring true for you?" Because your gut has probably been tracking this longer than we have.

There is one thing we can say with complete certainty, no Wayback Machine required. But we'll get to that.

1. 1

   QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets): The Per-User Rate Appears to Have Doubled

   Back around 2016, TSheets seemed to be charging somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 per user per month — plus a $20 monthly base fee. Dig into the Wayback Machine and you'll find snapshots that suggest that was roughly the going rate for a while. We're not claiming this is gospel. We just noticed it.

   Fast forward to today. QuickBooks Time — which absorbed TSheets after Intuit acquired them in 2018 — is raising its rate to $10 per user per month effective July 2026, still with that same $20 base fee on top. That's a 100% increase in the per-user cost over roughly ten years, if our Wayback Machine browsing is telling the truth.

   Here's the part that made us do a double-take: in 2016, TSheets was actually cheaper per user than Standard Time®. Now it costs more. Funny how the math works out when you nudge the price a little every few years and nobody's watching.

   Does that match your experience? Have you felt the squeeze? Or is this all just noise and your bill has been perfectly stable? We genuinely don't know. Our gut says prices have drifted up. Maybe yours does too.

2. 2

   Clockify: From Free to… Well, Complicated

   When Clockify launched in 2017, it was completely free. Unlimited users, no credit card, no catches. That was the whole pitch — and it worked spectacularly. They built a massive user base on the back of a genuinely free product.

   The thing about "free" is that it's not really a pricing model. It's a growth strategy. Paid plans arrived a few years in, topping out at $14.99 per user per month today. And in April 2026, Clockify announced that the free plan would be capped at five users, with billable hours tracking, CSV/Excel exports, project time estimates, and shared reports all migrating to paid tiers.

   Is that "inflation"? Technically they didn't raise a price — they invented one where none existed before. But if your shop built a workflow around free Clockify, the math is not in your favor. Your effective price increase is somewhere between "a lot" and "infinite," depending on how generously you want to define the word "increase."

   Again — we noticed this. We can't prove it's a trend. But it rhymes with one.